The Rag Blog

It would be comical, if not so pathetic.

“More than 10 blinking electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger,” reports the Associated Press. “Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down and bomb squads were sent in before authorities declared the devices were harmless.”

In short, Americans are easily frightened by crass manifestations of the tawdry and shallow consumer society they passively accept, even celebrate, usually with dangerous levels of credit card debt. Fear and mistrust are now endemic, thanks to nearly six years of incessant propaganda concerning universal terrorists, Muslim evil-doers, liquid bombs, homegrown fanatics, even dire warnings of pregnant suicide bombers lurking on the local bus or train.

“Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc. and parent of Cartoon Network, said the devices were part of a promotion for the TV show ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force,’ a surreal series about a talking milkshake, a box of fries and a meatball…. It said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, San Francisco and Philadelphia.”

However, nothing is more surreal than the idea Muslims want to convert the world to Islam by sword or nuke, kill all the Jews, behead heretics in Thedford, Nebraska, and force all our women to wear chadors. Nothing is more ludicrous than the term “Islamofascism” and brainless comparisons between Hitler and Ahmadinejad. It is completely absurd to believe Iran will patch together a nuke one day and drop it on Israel the next. Indeed, the prospect of flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover AFB in increasing numbers and over 600,000 dead Iraqis predicated on lies and absurd falsification is grotesquely and nauseatingly surreal, to say the least.

Obviously, the neocons have us right where they want us—afraid of our own shadows, mistaking such for Osama with blood-soaked scimitar in hand, and taking puerile marketing gimmicks staged by multinational “entertainment” corporations as bombs.

The Bush administration, in a sense, is getting what it wants in the wider Middle East. To battle a fictitious Shi’ite crescent (a construct by Jordan’s King Abdullah), it has emboldened even more a reactionary Sunni crescent (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates), thus exacerbating to a paroxysm the “strategy” it has already applied in Iraq: sectarianism as the golden parameter of imperial divide and rule. Historically, Sunnis and Shi’ites have co-existed amid social tensions. But never have these tensions been so cynically exploited – by Washington – as in post-invasion Iraq and the wider Middle East.

The administration of US President George W Bush was forced to acknowledge that the monumental disaster of occupied Iraq had to be blamed on a new scapegoat. Thus the umpteenth twist in the “war on terror”: exit al-Qaeda, enter Iran.

The Sunni Arab “axis of fear” is merrily playing along. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia even complained in a Kuwaiti newspaper that Iran is trying to convert Sunni Arabs to Shi’ism. Even Israel is now by all means allied with Saudi Arabia against Iran – Mecca/Jerusalem against Qom; Muslims and Jews battling Muslims.

It’s enlightening to compare this development with how Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, sees it – as nothing other than a replay of the British Empire’s divide-and-rule. Washington is once again sowing the seeds of discord among Muslims: “Bush and his allies are in favor of further unrest, turmoil and crises so that they can justify deployment of their troops in the region.”

Shi’ites also happen to live in the midst of the “axis of fear” – such as in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies. Beyond sectarianism, Arab popular perception is alert enough to identify this for what it is: a war of the US – supported by dictatorial Arab regimes – against Islam. And the target is not only Iran: the Saudi/Israeli link is also anti-Hamas – an obvious point as the House of Saud is little else than an annex of Washington.

A recent survey of Arab public opinion by the British YouGov group revealed that Israel (88%) is the “greatest threat to the security and future” of the Middle East, followed by the US, al-Qaeda and finally Iran (33%). This has not prevented the bulk of Arab mainstream media from engaging in a systematic anti-Iranian propaganda wave.

NAJAF, Iraq, Jan 31 (IPS) – Iraqi government lies over the killing of hundreds of Shias in an attack on Sunday stand exposed by independent investigations carried out by IPS in Iraq.

Conflicting reports had arisen earlier on how and why a huge battle broke out around the small village Zarqa, located just a few kilometres northeast of the Shia holy city Najaf, which is 90 km south of Baghdad.

One thing certain is that when the smoke cleared, more than 200 people lay dead after more than half a day of fighting Sunday Jan. 28. A U.S. helicopter was shot down, killing two soldiers. Twenty-five members of the Iraqi security force were also killed.

“We were going to conduct the usual ceremonies that we conduct every year when we were attacked by Iraqi soldiers,” Jabbar al-Hatami, a leader of the al-Hatami Shia Arab tribe told IPS.

“We thought it was one of the usual mistakes of the Iraqi army killing civilians, so we advanced to explain to the soldiers that they killed five of us for no reason. But we were surprised by more gunfire from the soldiers.”

The confrontation took place on the Shia holiday of Ashura which commemorates Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the most revered of Shia saints. Emotions run high at this time, and self-flagellation in public is the norm.

Many southern Shia Arabs do not follow Iranian-born cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They believe the religious leadership should be kept in the hands of Arab clerics. Al-Hatami and al-Khazaali are two major tribes that do not follow Sistani.

Tribal members from both believe the attack was launched by the central government of Baghdad to stifle growing Shia-Sunni unity in the area.

“Our convoy was close to the al-Hatami convoy on the way to Najaf when we heard the massive shooting, and so we ran to help them because our tribe and theirs are bound with a strong alliance,” a 45-year-old man who asked to be referred to as Ahmed told IPS.

Ahmed, a member of the al-Khazali tribe said “our two tribes have a strong belief that Iranians are provoking sectarian war in Iraq which is against the belief of all Muslims, and so we announced an alliance with Sunni brothers against any sectarian violence in the country. That did not make our Iranian dominated government happy.”

The fighting took place on the Diwaniya-Najaf road and spread into nearby date-palm plantations after pilgrims sought refuge there.

“American helicopters participated in the slaughter,” Jassim Abbas, a farmer from the area told IPS. “They were soon there to kill those pilgrims without hesitation, but they were never there for helping Iraqis in anything they need. We just watched them getting killed group by group while trapped in those plantations.”

Citing Iranian involvement with Iraqi militias and Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the Bush administration has shifted to offense in its confrontation with Iran — building up the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf and promising more aggressive moves against Iranian operatives in Iraq and Lebanon.

The behind-the-scenes struggle between the two nations could explode into open warfare over a single misstep, analysts and U.S. military officials warn.

This is the preeminent, really the only question in American politics today: Do we want to go to war with Iran or not? With the escalating chaos in Iraq and the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, is it in our interests or not to get into a shooting war with Iran? The debate over the ‘surge’ of US troops into Baghdad is significant in its own way, but it pales in comparison to this one.

I’ve always viewed the fears that the White House would try expand the war into Iran with a mix of deep skepticism, fascination and latent foreboding. Logically, it makes no sense on any number of counts. But the last half dozen years has taught us all that that’s simply not a significant obstacle. There are any number of ridiculous gambits I was sure these guys wouldn’t try before they did try them.

Again, the ‘sensible’ interpretation of what’s happening right now is that the administration is trying to regain control of the situation in Iraq. And to further that aim they’re rattling their sabres at Iran to get them to back off and stop making trouble. That’s the sensible explanation. But we’re not dealing with sensible people. And much more important, the folks who are running this show are simply too stupid to be trusted to execute such a delicate and perilous feint.

I don’t mean they’re dumb people. I’m sure they have high IQs. Most went to prestigious universities. They have lists of accomplishments. But the record of the last six years shows so many mistakes, such a record of incapability and incompetence, so many misjudgements, screw-ups and boners that there’s no other suitable word.

Through plan or imbecility (and most likely, given who were talking about, both) they’re drifting toward war with Iran.

As I wrote last night, I think the new campaign of anonymous leaks suggesting Iranian involvement in the Najaf raid has rather less than no credibility. But even if you assumed, for the sake of discussion, that it were tied to, say, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and that (as the narrative goes) the attack was retaliation for the Erbil raid on the Iranian consulate, that still would not change the question we face: is it in our national interest to go to war with Iran or not?

Everything flows from the answer to that question. Tits for tats or who started what fade into the background. If the answers no, we should be calibrating our actions to avoid such an outcome, not taking actions likely to provoke it. We need a regional plan to walk this mess back from the brink rather than simply yanking every thread on this already frayed fabric and watching it disintegrate in front of us.

We’ve heard a few squawks and warnings from members of Congress. But now is the time for members of the House and the Senate to get serious about asserting some control over this rapid descent.

I’ve said this before. But perhaps it seems like hyperbole. So I’ll say it again. The president’s interests are now radically disjoined from the country’s. We can handle a setback like Iraq. It really is a big disaster. But America will certainly surive it. President Bush — in the sense of his legacy and historical record — won’t. It’s all Iraq for him. And Iraq is all disaster. So, from his perspective (that is to say, through the prism of his interests rather than the country’s — which he probably can’t separate) reckless gambits aimed at breaking out of this ever-tightening box make sense.

Think of it like this. He’s a death row prisoner concocting a thousand-to-one plan to break out of prison. For him, those are good odds. The rest of us are doing three months for disorderly conduct. And he’s trying to rope us into his harebrained scheme. Like I said, his interests are very different from ours.

BEIJING (Reuters) – President Bush should scrap his unilateral approach and respect religious diversity in his “war on terror” to resolve troubles in Iraq, a senior Chinese official said in comments published on Thursday.

Recent anti-war protests across the United States illustrated that the Iraq war was unjust, Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, wrote in the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, in rare public criticism of U.S. policy.

Ye’s bureau oversees Christianity, Buddhism and Islam in the atheist country which only tolerates state-sanctioned religious institutions.

He criticized inflammatory terms such as “crusade” and “Islamic fascism” which Bush had used in the past when speaking of the fight against terrorism and Muslim militants.

Iran is supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons technology used to kill American troops, a senior US diplomat said, sending another warning to Iran against interfering in Iraq.

The claim, by US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, came as the US military said it was investigating whether Iranian agents were directly involved in a raid on an Iraqi compound in which five American soldiers were killed.

US officials have said the investigation is weighing whether the attack, by men dressed in uniforms like those of US troops, was the work of Iranians, or Iraqis trained by Iranians.

Burns said US officials had “picked up individuals who we believe are giving very sophisticated explosive technology to Shia insurgent groups who then use that technology to target and kill American soldiers”.

“It’s a very serious situation. And the message from the United States is, Iran should cease and desist,” he said.

The US has been tracking Iranian involvement in Iraqi insurgent attacks for about two years and has found increasing evidence that Iran has given assistance to Shi’ites in southern Iraq, Burns said in an interview with National Public Radio taped for broadcast later this week.

“They have attacked British soldiers near Basra and they’ve now begun to mount those operations throughout the country – at least in the Baghdad region as well.”

Washington officials have charged that Iran is providing Shi’ites with high-grade explosives capable of tearing through the armour on military vehicles.

The Bush administration has repeatedly warned Iran against fuelling violence in Iraq and US forces have detained a number of Iranian officials in raids over the past month.

“We warned Iran privately on a number of occasions over the last year and a half and the Iranians, of course, did not appear to listen to that, so now we’ve begun to detain those Iranian officials,” Burns said.

History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country — like the United States today — that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist. Why this is so can be a very abstract subject. Perhaps the best way to offer my thoughts on this is to say a few words about my new book, Nemesis, and explain why I gave it the subtitle, “The Last Days of the American Republic.” Nemesis is the third book to have grown out of my research over the past eight years. I never set out to write a trilogy on our increasingly endangered democracy, but as I kept stumbling on ever more evidence of the legacy of the imperialist pressures we put on many other countries as well as the nature and size of our military empire, one book led to another.

Professionally, I am a specialist in the history and politics of East Asia. In 2000, I published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, because my research on China, Japan, and the two Koreas persuaded me that our policies there would have serious future consequences. The book was noticed at the time, but only after 9/11 did the CIA term I adapted for the title — “blowback” — become a household word and my volume a bestseller.

Molly Ivins, the acerbic Texas writer who shed her family’s conservative roots to become one of the nation’s best-known, treasured (sometimes vilified) liberal commentators, died Wednesday after battling cancer. She was 62.

Writing on Salon.com in 1990, critic David Rubien compared Ivins to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Will Rogers, H.L. Mencken and Red Smith, writers (coincidentally men) who used satire to deflate pomp and prick conventional wisdom.

In her home state of Texas, Ivins was celebrated as a storyteller, whether it was in her recollection of late nights jawing with Democratic politicians or in her moving account in a post-Vietnam column of an unnamed boyfriend who died in that conflict.

The humor that laced her work did not deter her from forceful statements of opinion. In the last column posted online by her syndicate, dated Jan. 11, Ivins urged readers to act against President Bush’s plans to send more troops to Baghdad.

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders,” Ivins wrote, employing one of the president’s self-descriptions. “And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. . . . We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’ “

Friends and family who assisted Ivins through her illnesses included her assistant, Betsy Moon, who coaxed her last column out of her, according to Lou Dubose, a writer who co-authored two books with Ivins and was collaborating on a third.

“Molly was really well-served for a long time by this small group of men and women,” Dubose said.

There were sometimes disagreements among them: for instance, whether Ivins should attend and speak at a recent fundraiser for The Texas Observer (she did). But the tugging was understandable as friends balanced Ivins’ desire to remain active against their protectiveness.

Ivins came home to hospice care Monday. Three days earlier, she turned to Dubose from her hospital bed and said: “So how was your trip to New Jersey?” a reference to a research trip he’d completed for a book on the Bush administration and the Bill of Rights.

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” – from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

Report: Information Operations Roadmap:[PDF File]

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing “computer network attack” weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

The “roadmap” calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military’s ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is “critical to military success”. Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.

“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” it goes on.

The document’s authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. “Specific boundaries should be established,” they write. But they don’t seem to explain how.